Oh No, I Think I Might Have to Move to Home Assistant

And Other Major Life Changes

The last few months have been pretty wild… In April, my wife and I moved out of our tiny Oslo flat (41 m²) into her childhood home. This is a large (for us) 290 m² house in a smaller town. On the first night in the new house, with things pretty up in the air, our first baby decided he wanted to be born 3.5 weeks ahead of schedule. He’s a lovely guy! But it’s fair to say moving, renovating, selling a flat, and taking care of a bundle like that, is pretty intense — hence why I haven’t written the last few months.

I do want to refrain from posting a lot of our son online — but hopefully saying that his name is Alfred, and posting the pretty anonymised photo below is OK ☺️:

I got to make the house smart 🫶🏻

As part of the deal of us moving to «my wife’s» house and hometown, we agreed that I was allowed to make the house smart. Not that she was that difficult to convince, as she doesn’t find a smart home annoying. Especially if I manage to follow my own principle: Smartness should always be in addition to regular functions. There should always be a button to toggle a light — and then you can add smarts on top.

The current plan is to have the following be smart:

• Lights
• Blinds
• Heating
• Main door lock
• Garage door

For the main door lock, I’ve bought a Yale Linus L2, that I will install down the road. It has Matter support, and with the Yale Smart Keypad 2 I should be able to set up HomeKey, codes (also temporary), fingerprints and more — all while stille having the option of using a regular key. (All our old keys will still work!)

I don’t know what I’ll do with the garage door, yet, though. It has an old electric opener — but hopefully, I can figure something out that doesn’t include getting a new opener.

For blinds, I’m simply waiting for Ikea to release their Matter offer in January. (I can’t even buy their old model, as they’re out of stock.)

The heating is a bit complicated, as my father-in-law had set the house up with a system from the company Futurehome — so he has a mixture of Z-Wave and Zigbee gear. The problem is that that company just went bankrupt, and is in some heat currently… I’ll probably end up with a combination of the Z-Wave hating in the floors and Mill smart heating, often via this great plug.

Now, on to the lights

I’ve written previously about why I prefer smart bulbs to smart switches. The main con about bulbs is that they’re more expensive — especially in a large house. However, as we’re not allowed to swap out the light switches ourselves here in Norway, I think I’d lose that benefit by having to pay an electrician. I also had a head start as I had smart bulbs in our flat already.

The bulbs I’m using are a combination of Philips Hue and Ikea Trådfri. I buy from Ikea whenever possible, and buy Hue if the type I want isn’t available from Ikea. I especially like the filament bulbs that can change temperature, like this one 🖇️. And the switches are from Flic 🖇️.¹

In our flat, I was able to keep everything in HomeKit/Apple Home. However, I was open to having to run Homebridge on my always-on Mac Mini, if something in the house wouldn’t play nice.² Even though setup, with the way I was doing things, was a slog, I was pleased that I could do everything I wanted with just HomeKit and the app Controller for HomeKit. The end state would be something very stable and easy to adjust. And I wouldn’t be relying on the extra Mac.

However, due to some limitations Apple has placed on HomeKit, the method relied on creating numerous scenes; 4 or 7 per light. Using 7 would make a small thing (that I won’t go into here) a bit nicer, so of course I did that… And as I was almost done with setting up the entire house, I learned a «fun» idiosyncrasy with HomeKit: There is an absolute maximum limit of 100 scenes in a home! 🤦🏻‍♂️

I probably have to do it all over again…

Controller has a cool beta feature they just released, where you can have your lights still be «hosted» on your Apple Home hub, but control them via something they call Workflows. These, as opposed to automations that I had been using, need something like an always-on Mac to run, though. But they are more powerful. I could use this for the rest of my lights (and use the 100 scenes for most of it). However, I don’t love that I would have two different systems among my lights — and I’m worried about the stability. I want the switches to be rock solid, as I don’t want my wife (or guests) to be annoyed.³

So in my mind, there are two options for me:

1. Redo everything using workflows in Controller.
2. Move everything to Home Assistant (running on the Mac Mini).

Option 1: Workflows in Controller

Controlling our lights through Home.app has been great — and this is something I really want to have as a fallback (or when you want something a bit more specialised). With the current setup, the lights get sent straight from the first-party hubs (Philips Hue hub and Ikea Dirigera) to Apple Home (on the Apple TV, I think).

However, running the switches/switching with workflows on beta software on the Mac Mini is a bit scary to me… And I would’ve still liked to be able to use scenes, as that would make things easier to adjust down the line. Doing everything with workflows still wouldn’t allow me more scenes.

Option 2: Home Assistant

HA is obviously very powerful. It also has several plugins that do the temperature adjustments automatically.⁴ However, having to run a VM on my Mac isn’t something I’d love to do…

I would probably want to remove the Hue and Ikea hub from the equation, and run everything directly into HA. But to accomplish this, I need a Zigbee stick and a Z-Wave stick (or something that combines the two 🖇️.⁵

Cons for going the Home Assistant route:

• I need to buy extra hardware for €100+ — and money is really tight these days.
• Things will be relying heavily on the Mac Mini — which I especially don’t love, as my wi-fi is pretty shitty.⁶
• I need to faff around with things I’m not very comfortable with…⁷
• In general, It will probably take more time than the alternative(s). Not only would I have to create all scenes and automations again — I would also have to re-add every single smart device. And everything in a system I simply don’t know yet.

Pros for going the Home Assistant route:

• I already have to find a solution for the Z-Wave thermostats in the floors — and this would fix that as well. It would also fix several potential future problems I might encounter.
  • It would also allow me even more flexibility when looking at new devices to add.
• I currently have both an Ikea hub and Philips hub, running their own Zigbee network.⁸ And I don’t think this allows the bulbs to help each other when it comes to creating the Zigbee mesh. If I had them all go straight to HA, I think they would be able to do that.
• I do love myself some tinkering and flexibility… I also like open-source projects.
• This would make me less reliant on the Apple ecosystem.⁹
  • However, I would still be able to pipe my devices back into Home.app — which would be great for both me and my wife.
• I’d probably be able to create better solutions in general, with this system, than what was available to me in HomeKit.

When I started this entire project, I was very close to building everything with Home Assistant from the start. And now, of course, I really wish I did just that… Going for HA barely lost out to just keeping things in HomeKit/Controller because I had already solved the problems, and knew what I was doing. However, the surprise scene limit makes it so the «keeping things in HomeKit» option becomes significantly worse. And this then makes Home Assistant more attractive.

So I guess it’s time for a nerdy adventure..!